When Mark Daley and his husband, Jason, became foster parents to two brothers, they fell in love with the children right away. But Daley and his husband also know that their family could change at any moment. Eventually, the boys were reunified with their biological parents. Daley's memoir is Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family. Daley talks about the foster care system at large, as well as the joy and pain he and Jason experienced as foster parents. Also, TV critic David Bianculli reflects on Curb Your Enthusiasm, as it enters its 12th and final season. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
On the Ted radio hour, linguist Ann.
Curzan says she gets a lot of complaints about people using the pronoun they to refer to one person.
I sometimes get into arguments with people.
Where they will say to me, but.
It can't be singular.
And I will say, but it is.
The history behind words causing a lot of debate.
That's on the Ted radio hour from NPR.
This is FRESH AIR.
I am Tyria Gross.
No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't get pregnant, jokes my guest Mark Daley in the opening sentence of his new memoir.
It wasn't a fertility problem.
It was that Daley's spouse was his husband.
They both wanted to have children, which meant their choices were surrogacy, which they were ambivalent about, private adoption, which could take years, or foster children.
In 2016, they chose fostering.
They soon became the foster parents of two brothers, three months and 13 months old.
Daley and his spouse, Jason, fell in love with the children, and the boys thrived.
But when the boys birth parents decided to fight in court to get the boys back, Daley was alarmed at the possibility of losing the children he loved.
He worried about them being returned to their birth parents, who were dealing with mental health and addiction issues and seemed to be indifferent to their children and even worse, neglectful.
Through the ups and downs of his family story, Daly writes about the larger foster care system and the ways in which it's a dysfunctional bureaucracy.